April 3, 2011: Madison WI and Town of Burke

Not quite a hiking adventure today, but I did some quick geocaches to get into the swing of things this year. I was going to the local Menards store for one thing, so I also put a few geocaches in the nearby area on my Windows mobile smartphone and tried this out some more. I tried this when I was in Dallas last fall, and had some trouble working with the interface. I did an update of the software (using a program called GCzII by NICQUE software) and willing to try it again with some drive-up type geocaches.

The first one I drove to was a "dead-end road" type cache, extra tiny container. Didn't find it. Didn't care about finding it after 10 minutes.

The second cache was a similar situation, but at an active T intersection. Didn't find it, too many muggles driving by, didn't care about finding it after 10 minutes (but tried a bit longer).

The cellphone and software were working fine, Those 2 geocaches are the type that are spring up a lot lately, and I find I'm getting annoyed just pulling up at one of these type caches. I'm about 95% sure I will actively avoid these types of geocaches in the future, no matter how close by to a good one it may be.

There is another, more promising one a few blocks away. Turned out this one took me into a small woods behind a water tower and cellular antenna tower. Semi-conventional, I did manage to find it. Now I'm back in the swing of things!

That made 1 find in 3 attempts. I had also put some other geocaches a few miles away in the Town of Burke on the phone. First a stop at the Burke Park. Been here a handful of times before (and blogged them in past years). Made a second find of a very traditional geocache.

Next a back-tracked a bit to the town cemetary. The part by the road is marked as the location for the old township school. Geocache was a micro-container in the bushes behind the memorial.

Found out after I logged this find that there was another geocache in the actual cemetery off in the distance. I failed to download that to the phone (but I could have discovered it if I had used the "caches near this one" feature of the software while I was there). I was ready to wrap up and go home anyhow. All photos were taken with the cellphone camera today.

I think I may use the phone / GCzII software combo again during some evening walks around town this summer. For most trips, I'll stick to the Garmin GPS and my Nikon DSLR yet.